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Altostrata

Altostrata

The Carlat Psychiatry Bloghttp://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/ Dr. Daniel Carlat is a prominent psychiatrist who publishes prolifically. He is unrelenting in his criticisms of psychiatry's conflicts of interest and symbiosis with the pharmaceutical industry.

He permits a wide range of views in comments on his blog.

Aside from his practice in Newburyport, MA, he derives his own income from a paid monthly newsletter, The Carlat Psychiatry Report, in which he advises doctors about how to use psych drugs. He is, therefore, conflicted in that he strongly believes in the value of psychiatric medications used widely but "properly," and unable to see how his own practice is compromised by bad research and lack of knowledge about adverse effects.

The Last Psychiatristhttp://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ If you can get beyond the advertising on his blog, he has interesting things to say about a lot of things, such as http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/09/are_there_really_so_many_peopl.html#more I've corresponded with him and he acknowledges antidepressant withdrawal syndrome. He also agrees with me that Nardil withdrawal syndrome may have driven David Foster Wallace to suicide, and psych drug reactions were involved in the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson (both of whom suffered from intractable insomnia).

Thought Broadcasthttp://thoughtbroadcast.com Dr. Steve Balt, psychiatrist, practices in San Rafael, California, in a semi-holistic manner. He does not always prescribe drugs.

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cinephile

cinephile

1 Boring Old Man It's a blog from an older psychiatrist who is exposing all the toxic lies and decadence from big pharma to psychiatry. The front-page has many items on Zyprexa and it ain't pretty. Get out your barf bag when you read about the "Viva Zyprexa" ad campaign. I couldn't make it half-way through. Just...shocking. Here's a taste of the poison: a declassified ad slick from the "Viva Zyprexa" launch meeting. I especially love the line "You'll never be the same again!" BOY ain't that the truth! God, they really are selling this poison like a door-to-door salesman sells steak-knives

And so far, the blog has at least one genuine stand-up-and-cheer entry. Look what he writes here about how psychiatry USED to be:

I miss the days when we didn't act like we knew things we didn't know. We talked, and argued, and changed our minds. We wondered what Shizophrenia is, why it happens. We worried about the lives of the chronic schizophrenic patients and where they lived, what their lives were like. We worried a ton about Tardive Dyskinesia. We tried to get our minds around the loose genetic factors in Manic Depressive illness and Schizophrenia. Analysts were excited about the possibility of Biological Markers and Biologists knew what Narcissism was. We figured out how wrong our predecessors had been about homosexuality. We argued with the Psychologists and then went out for drinks together. We thought about a lot of mental illness as "hurting in your mental" rather than as things with initials. We knew what we didn't know and wrestled with what we did know. New things like obsessive people getting better on SSRIs poked holes in what we thought about obsessional people and we had to rethink the whole story. And then there were some people who were depressed because they were angry, just like we'd always thought. The dialog was alive, relevant, collegial, open-ended instead of key opinion leaders talking about the same things over and over. And most of us knew the names and doses of the drugs, but not which company manufactured them. We sure didn't need a public database to see which drug company paid which Psychiatrist to give what traveling dog and pony show with company slides [because it would've been empty]. And we'd never even heard of ghostwriting. I miss those days a lot. They really were my "good old days."

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alexjuice

alexjuice

It's really hard to believe that so few Doc's acknowledge SSRI w/d lasting more than a few months at most. I mentioned to my psychiatrist that I thought I was still suffering the effects of a too-rapid Effexor detox 12 months ago. She didn't dismiss it as impossible. However, she said, simply: "I've never heard of anything like that before."

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Altostrata

Altostrata

It's really hard to believe that so few Doc's acknowledge SSRI w/d lasting more than a few months at most. I mentioned to my psychiatrist that I thought I was still suffering the effects of a too-rapid Effexor detox 12 months ago. She didn't dismiss it as impossible. However, she said, simply: "I've never heard of anything like that before."

Alex.I

Well, Alex, now she has. She can't in good faith say that to her next patient who has withdrawal syndrome.

It's important for us to tell doctors what happened to us, even though they may initially be resistant to listening.

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bells

bells

He's a UK consultant psychiatrist who works for the National Health Service which is quite unusual I think - most of the ones openly critical of the system seem to end up lecturing in universities or working in private practice rather than right at the frontlines of it.

This is very important because one of the criticisms of Dr. Pigott (he is a psychologist) is that he has a bias due to being a partner in NeuroAdvantage, a neuorotherapy company. Supposedly, he is offering a competing solution for people who might normally take antidepressants.

Personally, I think it is fair to point out potential conflicts of interest because we certainly do it with psychiatrists who are connected with drug companies who have done research.

So when someone with Dr. Nardo's credentials is backing Dr. Pigott, obviously, this are big time problems with the Star D study that need to be looked at.

Finally, it is important to mention that Dr. Nardo in his blog entries on Star D, specifically stressed that Dr. Pigott was very careful in his analysis not to make statements that he couldn't back up with facts.

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brighteningup

brighteningup

I'd like to nominate Richard Bental - he's a UK psychologist whose written a book highly critical of the use of drugs to treat serious psychiatric disorders - called Doctoring the Mind: Is our treatment of mental illness really any good?

He doesn't have his own blog but I have found a guest blog by him here:-

Also worth a look, though not a regular commentator on mental health or SSRIs, Ben Goldacre is a Doctor working for the NHS who has for sometime written a blog called Bad Science which criticises flaws in the ways in which science is presented by both the media and scientific journals; he has a go at Big Pharma a lot (he's really not very keen on homoeopaths either) but one key target on occasions has been SSRIs. The blog has a search so you can search out the SSRI related posts but a few key ones are:-

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Catalyzt

Catalyzt

Holy crap! The Boring Old Man blog is anything BUT boring! And it's smoking hot right now, January 3. Spielmans, Juriedini, Healy and Purssey got their letter published in JAMA Psychiatry... and Gibbons et al are grasping at straws trying to defend themselves.

I am gonna give this URL to EVERY therapist at our clinic. Because there are a lot of very bright, rowdy, bad-ass activists in clinical practice who are gonna be very, very interested in this.

Because, brothers and sisters, EVERY TIME principled, well-informed, carefully researched objections to the use of SSRIs are published, it protects the licenses of therapists who choose not to make psych referrals for routine, garden variety depression, or to refer to psychiatrists who use SSRIs sparingly or not at all. It encourages healthy skepticism, following our conscience, and putting our clients first.

Who is this guy? He's a genius... I just got back from a session with my own shrink, and I was paraphrasing a lot of what was on his blog. And my shrink (who's in his 80s and a psychoanalyst) is telling me, "Oh, yeah. Everything went to hell with the DSM III, that's when it all started." (Meaning the shift to "evidence-based" practice, the shift to treating symptoms without looking at etiology, etc.)

Thanks so much for posting this. Very grateful. I'm off to Facebook to raise a little hell... and back at the clinic next week to raise a little more.

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Catalyzt

Catalyzt

Thanks, Allo'! Mickey seems like a very sharp guy. I saw you over there... I'm hammering on some case management stuff right now, but hope to back over there again soon.

Regrettably, very few of my clinician friends picked up on the link I posted on FB. Ah, well. Will keep trying... discussed a little of this in a supervision group at the clinic, and it will probably come up at my other training site as well.

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alexjuice

alexjuice

I came across the lastpsychiatrist blog and read a sem-interesting piece. The piece perhaps is even fully interesting, but I was too muddled in the head to understand all of it. I could tell enough to know it was interesting to some degree.

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btdt

btdt

Takes a look at Dr Healey is it y or ey ... don't care just now and hope you don't.

Just a bit of what he has to day.

"If you are convinced that SSRIs don't work and antipsychotics are dangerous and meds are all prescribed off label, conduct for yourself a little experiment: tell a Medicaid patient you're not medicating him. I'll be in the chopper, where apparently it is safe.

I've said this before and I will repeat it here, you can blame the overuse of medication on anything you want and you will all be completely wrong, the most important reason a medication was used is that the patient showed up, and they showed up because that's where the state told them to go. In 100% of the cases when a psychiatrist in urban camo tells me he doesn't use antipsychotics or stimulants, I know that all of his prescriptions say "Xanax" and "#120". And I don't fault him, how could I? It works for what it's for, and what it's for is not punching your girlfriend in the face, which is the same reason other guys use Abilify or Zyprexa or whatever. When I graduated from residency I used to look down on the benzo docs because I was an arrogant animal, I had a retiring Puerto Rican psychiatrist tell me that back in PR they used Xanax 2 TID as an antipsychotic "and it worked very well", and I thought, madre dios, this man is a lunatic, how did he get across the border? And now I'm not so sure they didn't have it right all along. Or maybe I need a benzo, I don't know. Jesus Christ, I need a nap.

I'm happy to point out flaws in clinical trials and studies, it's fun and easy but it is ultimately pointless, no one cares, no one listens, I have a blog full of them and it couldn't be less relevant to anyone. Psychiatry isn't committing professional suicide, Dr. Healy, fear not: the government needs its unarmed security services, now more than ever, and it will get them at cut rate prices because no one can argue that following the next step in a flowchart is worth anything more than a pat on the back. On the other hand, I get that they have a lot of antipsychotics in Washington DC, but do you know what they don't have a lot of in Washington DC? Riots. I guess it all worked out, I have no idea how but you can't argue with results, ask the Athenians and Madridians if their system worked better. I once had a patient with no pathology whatsoever try to kill me, the gigantic irony of it being that if he had succeeded, who would they have blamed? Me-- for undermedicating him! And God bless Dr. Anderson, I don't think it'll help but at least he's trying despite the criticism, at least he's willing to admit that though the whole thing is a carny act he's still the one saddled with the responsibility.

But to the government employees in academia, you cannot assume something is inappropriate if you have no idea about what is appropriate. And to the government employees in government, you get what you pay for. No one is saying that there isn't suffering all over the place, but that's different than a psychiatric pathology. If 70% of the patients are not truly ill, then the sick ones are only getting 30% of the attention, do you see? If the majority of Medicaid patients aren't real patients, then why would you expect them to get real treatments?"

There is an awareness here I don't see in many places I find it extremely refreshing. This is just one bit of this linked blog entry I have not read the comments yet but they are generally at least as interesting as his posts. I especially like the comments by resident shrinks asking him how to manage this job if indeed all he has to say is true... provocative but more importantly to me correct. IMHO

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Meimeiquest

Meimeiquest

I would add kellybroganmd.com. She doesn't spend a lot of time criticizing psychiatry because she's busy looking for better solutions. The only certified pdoc I know of who does not initiate ADs ( she has patients already on them decide what they want to do). But I wonder if she works with the "serious mental illness" patients. I learned the importance of that term when my insurance kept paying, paying, paying for psychotherapy.

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BeatAnxiety

BeatAnxiety

Shipko gets it. He does imply that withdrawal is going to happen no matter what. Tapering will allow you parachute into enemy territory vs crash landing there. Either way it will suck. Particularly critical of SSRIs.

What I find interesting is that the sufferers of this are still in a minority. Both my brothers rapidly stopped ADs and had no ill effects. My youngest brother stopped Effexor cold turkey. He complained of bad depression for a week or so and then said he was happier off the drug. Go figure.

Having said that I don't know what his actual practices are like, if he knows anything practical about withdrawal (criticism of psych drugs does not necessarily equal the ability to taper someone off them properly) or if his theories to counter the bio paradigm are valid or not. Nonetheless this bit about him looks promising:

For many years I have been troubled by the rapid and tragic degeneration of my field. Contemporary psychiatry has fallen under the sway of biological psychiatry, where patients no longer receive proper care. Today’s commonly held and misguided belief is that human suffering is a brain problem. And the cure for human pain has been reduced to a pill, as if pharmaceuticals address the agency of human suffering. Human struggle is not now, nor ever has been a brain problem. It is a human problem, pure and simple. Psychotherapy has become a lost practice.

Recently, there has been a growing number of critiques about pharmaceutical psychiatry’s corrupt and destructive practices. I address these issues with a constructive presentation of an alternative understanding and practice, which I put into book form, The Psychotherapy of Character, The Play of Consciousness in the Theater of the Brain, written as a narrative.

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Ssriwarrior

Ssriwarrior

I would like to second Dr. Kelly Brogan! She is truly one of my heroes. She has been outspoken in the field of reproductive psychiatry and has transformed her practice into a holistic non-pharmaceutical approach to treating women during pregnancy and postpartum period.

Her personal story is very inspiring, as she describes her fall from modern psychiatry, the alienation from her colleagues, and discovering her own power by healing herself of a thyroid disorder she had after childbirth.

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ang

ang

Facebook befriend or just read timeline John Read. brilliant He is UK, but has lectured in NZ, hope he lectures in Australia. Psychologist.

Also have a reference to an article, could I just copy and paste it here in full? Called the medicating of america, or something, only two pages long. Or the medicating of inventiveness, but I have it on my computer, could find it, is quite recently published. Trying to remember with my fuddle brain. The dumbing down of America or something. To do with medicating people who are bright and clever as kids, very well written.

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ang

ang

I once had a patient with no pathology whatsoever try to kill me, the gigantic irony of it being that if he had succeeded, who would they have blamed? Me-- for undermedicating him!

My comment. This stuff stays in your brain, so they show up on no meds called crazy...crazy. Anyhow :

ie My dear Dr Booth, Western Australia. Was so kind and generous as a private psychiatrist, taking on the "poor" ie he bulk billed. Because basically, my sister had private, I didn't. He was so thrilled, I had travelled 450 km just to see him, wonderful........I took his stuff, three months later went manic, had a seizure (I had survived until 35 years of age, until then, no medical problems). So now, with such fear in my heart, was told the mania and the seizures were "underlying conditions".. oh damn, I didnt know that.

Problem being he put me on other stuff, I gave up when I became pregnant, as a male, he thought all my problems were over, not so simple. Four months afterthe baby, severe withdrawals, gp gave me a valium, psychosis in waves over three days... my poor gp telephoned this man, as I kept saying, during all my madness, ring Dr Booth. He rang Dr Booth, his advice? Send her to Graylands (a public mental institution 450 km away). (basically she is obviously mad?).

I eventually had to go back to see Dr Booth, suffering the PTSD and severe WD after 3 weeks in Graylands, uppers and downers, nearly got killed on this **** many times... I survived, ... Dr Booth was so horrified that they hadn't put me "back on drugs", and was also so astounded at how mentally well I was, despite the severe and horrific WD.... He was arrogant enough to tell me he had a patient, calling him from the street, at his house/// what did he do? Sent him to a public mental health institution. ie Was the illness, not the drugs. Arrogance? Yes. This man bolted long ago.. this Dr Booth.

Lets hope they all realize they will get sued... as Dr Booth was under that threat. He had so many court issues. I do believe effexor is being used in a class action for sufferers in the USA. I know it is an antidepressant, that is the worst one I know, and I been on lots.

So although a psych said he had someone presenting.... on nothing, that was me at a public hospital, totally off the planet, damn 14 months after giving up antidepressents. They gave me a valium, then madness... the original psych? Nah not my problem she is obviously crazy.

I am going to see this original gp, who knew me personally before all this mind bending ****. The one who did as I asked, contacted Dr Booth, and was horrified by the reply from dear DR Booth. It will be a stressful visit, but I am looking forward to it.

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ang

ang

Someone in Western Australia murdered a lady, raped her in sand dunes, and murdered her. Yes he was going through WD. so was it the drugs? or withdrawing from the drugs? We all know what the drug companies would say.......

You said that Washington doesn't have riots, lets say, it is only a matter of time. Ying and Yang. Eventually these drugs dont work, people get worse. And coming off them is worse than anything ever experience before going on them.

The medicated world, doesnt work

China has no riots either, no guns, no murders, no psychiatrists either.

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ang

ang

The Carlat Psychiatry Bloghttp://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/ Dr. Daniel Carlat is a prominent psychiatrist who publishes prolifically. He is unrelenting in his criticisms of psychiatry's conflicts of interest and symbiosis with the pharmaceutical industry.

He permits a wide range of views in comments on his blog.

Aside from his practice in Newburyport, MA, he derives his own income from a paid monthly newsletter, The Carlat Psychiatry Report, in which he advises doctors about how to use psych drugs. He is, therefore, conflicted in that he strongly believes in the value of psychiatric medications used widely but "properly," and unable to see how his own practice is compromised by bad research and lack of knowledge about adverse effects.

The Last Psychiatristhttp://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ If you can get beyond the advertising on his blog, he has interesting things to say about a lot of things, such as http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/09/are_there_really_so_many_peopl.html#more I've corresponded with him and he acknowledges antidepressant withdrawal syndrome. He also agrees with me that Nardil withdrawal syndrome may have driven David Foster Wallace to suicide, and psych drug reactions were involved in the deaths of Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson (both of whom suffered from intractable insomnia).

Thought Broadcasthttp://thoughtbroadcast.com Dr. Steve Balt, psychiatrist, practices in San Rafael, California, in a semi-holistic manner. He does not always prescribe drugs.

Feel free to add others here.

I just wanted to say well done .... Now I try and research anything on the web, to find out about giving up antidepressants, and all of them tell us sufferers to go to the site surviving antidepressants. I just think that is absolutely amazing, and well done! All the other sites are run, I think by drug information places, drug companies, the pathetic leaflets that they dont even put in the packets anymore. You have done so well, thankyou... I hope I will survive, but if I dont, well done!!! For trying.